Maybe the crux is whether the dark color significantly degrades user experience. For me it clearly does, and my guess is that’s what Sam is referring to when he says “What is the LW team thinking? This promo goes far beyond anything they’ve done or that I expected they would do.”
For me, that’s why this promotion feels like a different reference class than seeing the curated posts on the top or seeing ads on the SSC sidebar.
Yes, the dark mode is definitely a more visually intense experience, though the reference class here is not curated posts at the top, but like, previous “giant banner on the right advertising a specific post, or meetup series or the LW books, etc.”.
I do think it’s still more intense than that, and I am going to shipping some easier ways to opt out of that today, just haven’t gotten around to it (like, within 24 hours there should be a button that just gives you back whatever normal color scheme you previously had on the frontpage).
It’s pretty plausible the shift to dark mode is too intense, though that’s really not particularly correlated with this specific promotion, and would just be the result of me having a cool UI design idea that I couldn’t figure out a way to make work on light mode. If I had a similar idea for e.g. promoting the LW books, or LessOnline or some specific review winner, I probably would have done something similar.
If I open LW on my phone, clicking the X on the top right only makes the top banner disappear, but the dark theme remains. Relatedly, if it’s possible to disentangle how the frontpage looks on computer and phone, I would recommend removing the dark theme on phone altogether, you don’t see the cool space visuals on the phone anyway, so the dark theme is just annoying for no reason.
Maybe the crux is whether the dark color significantly degrades user experience. For me it clearly does, and my guess is that’s what Sam is referring to when he says “What is the LW team thinking? This promo goes far beyond anything they’ve done or that I expected they would do.”
For me, that’s why this promotion feels like a different reference class than seeing the curated posts on the top or seeing ads on the SSC sidebar.
Yes, the dark mode is definitely a more visually intense experience, though the reference class here is not curated posts at the top, but like, previous “giant banner on the right advertising a specific post, or meetup series or the LW books, etc.”.
I do think it’s still more intense than that, and I am going to shipping some easier ways to opt out of that today, just haven’t gotten around to it (like, within 24 hours there should be a button that just gives you back whatever normal color scheme you previously had on the frontpage).
It’s pretty plausible the shift to dark mode is too intense, though that’s really not particularly correlated with this specific promotion, and would just be the result of me having a cool UI design idea that I couldn’t figure out a way to make work on light mode. If I had a similar idea for e.g. promoting the LW books, or LessOnline or some specific review winner, I probably would have done something similar.
@David Matolcsi There is now a button in the top right corner of the frontpage you can click to disable the whole banner!
If I open LW on my phone, clicking the X on the top right only makes the top banner disappear, but the dark theme remains.
Relatedly, if it’s possible to disentangle how the frontpage looks on computer and phone, I would recommend removing the dark theme on phone altogether, you don’t see the cool space visuals on the phone anyway, so the dark theme is just annoying for no reason.
Yep, this is on my to-do list for the day, was just kind of hard to do for dumb backend reasons.
This too is now done.
it’s pretty how much lighter it is than normal, while still being quite dark!
have you a/b tested dark mode on new users? I suspect it would be a better default.
Makes it much harder to see what specific part of a comment a react is responding to, when you hover over it.
That seems like a straightforward bug to me. I didn’t even know that feature was supposed to exist :p